Philoking.comfrom Jason Burns’ perspective…

You knew it was coming. Dawn talked me into it, and I decided to give it a shot. I installed World of Warcraft on my MacBook Pro. My character is still the level 40 Undead Warlock I had months and months ago. So, with that, here are my thoughts:

It took me two attempts to install it. This is something I blame on the MacBook Pro actually. I have noticed that I cannot pick up the laptop while it is reading the optical drive. When I put any torque on the case, it seems to cause problems with the drive. I did move it while installing and on the 5th disc of course, it failed.

The second attempt I did without moving it and it worked perfectly, albeit it slowly! It took about 30 minutes to install it, and another few hours to get it all updated (1.5GB+ of downloads.)

I am having a problem with the game graphically, but it’s not exactly frame rates. I am getting decent frame rates (30+) with all graphics at max, the problem is that when I run it full screen it has this jerking quality while walking. The same issue does not exist when I have it in windowed mode.

So here I am, Philoking (obviously) on Kel’Thuzad if you wanna say hello. If you have some ideas to fix my nagging issue, leave me some comments. For your information, the laptop is the 2.2Ghz MBP with 2GB Ram and the 128MB GeForce 8600M GT.

A couple of things I have figured out I thought I would share with you.

World of Warcraft doesn’t jam up your registry, if you get it all installed on a machine, copy the c:\Program Files\World of Warcraft folder to an external drive or make a DVD backup, then you can copy that to the new machine and save yourself the time of a complete install

This works well, when I upgraded my laptop from XP to Vista, I moved the entire folder to another hard disk and safely moved it back. Once you have it on the Vista machine, create a new desktop shortcut, right click it, choose properties, and select “Windows XP SP2 Compatibility mode” and “Run This Program as Administrator.” Now you will be able to update and play it just fine.

If you are playing on a nVidia based laptop, you can use my previous tutorial on installing GeForce Go drivers for Vista.

So there you go, Vista is humming along fine, so is WoW. I am getting around 60fps in windowed mode, I can live with that. See you online.

It’s an odd proposition. I wrote an article that alluded to this fact about a year ago. With the advent of MySpace, Second Life and World of Warcraft, social communities are a thriving place. If you listened to the Philocast last week, you heard TJ and I talk about how incredible the group of World of Warcraft players are.

As we all well know, there are bad seeds. Upper level kids that ride around killing lower level characters out of spite exist. In all honesty, that is a very small part of the community and hardly worth mentioning.

I can’t count the amount of times I have had random players walk up to me and give me special abilities, help me kill someone or something that was killing me, or just simply offer to help with the quest I am on. It sounds simple, but think about that for just a moment.

When is the last time you dropped something and a stranger walked up and helped you out? When is the last time that a random person walked by and took the time to do something nice for you for no reason at all? In my opinion it does not happen much these days.

Sure, there are still good people out there, but think about it. I will toss out MySpace because it’s become a sexual hookup site, and I will dismiss Second Life because it’s becoming too commerce and politics related, but World of Warcraft, what a world it is these days.

Of course the game is a lot of fun, but there really is more. There are thousands of guilds were like players play together, work together towards common goals, and even a sort of “help out everyone” mentality where the group works to get each member the best gear by fighting together.

The game has really taken on a life of it’s own and by it’s millions of members, is doing something very well. I probably do not play as much as I could, life gets in the way, but you can find me easily. I am Philoking on Kel’Thuzad. I am a level 40 Undead Warlock and am always up for friends so add me if you want.

If you play WoW and have a similar, or dissimilar view, leave a comment and tell me what you like or don’t like about it.

So I have began again. This time a good guy, Alliance, this time a Dark Elf with actual skin and no showing bones, and this time on a non PVP server so I don’t have to worry about dumb 13 year old level 70 punks coming by and killing me because they are pissed that they got a D in gym.

I decided to start over because I had gotten so bored with the grind that I just didn’t play WoW at all. I wanted to start back to where it was fun and then when I get to a higher level, I’ll be able to play without fear of getting ganked over and over.

I also wanted to give World of Warcraft on Vista more of a look than just peeking around and seeing how things look. So I will play for awhile, keep you up to date, and maybe see a few of you on.

If you want to join me, I am on Quel’dorei server as Thephilo. Ultra creative name, I know.